SCOTUS will rule on abortion pill access in landmark case

The Supreme Court of the US has said it will consider a lower court ruling that would restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone and is considered to be tied to the standing and authority of the FDA.

The latest in the long-running legal saga over women’s reproductive rights – stripped when SCOTUS overturned the constitutional right to abortion last year – concerns the way in which women can get access to mifepristone, an alternative to surgical abortion that has become the most widely used means of terminating pregnancies in the US.

Earlier this year, a lower court ruling called on the FDA to revoke the two decades-old license for mifepristone altogether in a case brought by anti-abortion groups led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, although that order was placed on hold by SCOTUS while an appeals process went through.

In August, the appellate court ruled that the drug should stay on the market but wound back measures that were introduced by the FDA to make it easier to get access to the drug introduced after the right to abortion was upended with the strike-down of protections conferred by Roe vs Wade since the 1970s.

Those measures included telemedicine prescriptions and mail-order availability of the drug, prescribing by certain healthcare professionals other than a doctor, and a reduction in the timeframe for use to seven weeks of pregnancy rather than 10.

Industry observers are concerned that the litigation could set a dangerous precedent by undermining the FDA when it comes to approval decisions for medicines, creating a situation where judges can effectively ban drugs based on political and personal views and not medical science.

Now, the SCOTUS has also agreed to hear the case for mifepristone made by the Biden administration, as well as an appeal by mifepristone’s manufacturer Danco Laboratories, in the face of a mounting crackdown on reproductive rights in Republican-led states.

More than two dozen states have put in place outright abortion bans while others have introduced limits on abortion after a certain duration of pregnancy.

“Across the country, we’ve seen unprecedented attacks on women’s freedom to make their own health decisions,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre in a statement published today.

“States have imposed extreme and dangerous abortion bans that put the health of women in jeopardy and that threaten to criminalise doctors for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide,” she added. “No woman should be unable to access the health care that she needs. This should not happen in America, period.”

In October, a series of other pharma companies filed an amicus brief in support of Danco’s appeal, which argues that the lower court’s decision to overrule the FDA has upended a longstanding statutory and regulatory framework and allowing it to stand would “create chaos for the drug development and approval processes” in the US.